On the day Jay shipped out, I was sure I’d see him again. His own self-confidence seemed to block out all doubt and fear. He had been to our house for dinner several times before then, and both my parents took to him, though Mother more than Father. She liked his cheerful ambition, she said. It reminded her of her grandfather, who, unlike my father, who’d inherited money, had made his fortune by owning and buying several stores, and had always been keen on the future, even during troubled times, she told me.
Jay talked about his plans after the war, and he sounded ever more optimistic—he would own a railroad company or maybe an oil field or perhaps a car manufacturer since he knew a good deal about the process.
He seemed so sure of himself that you found yourself focusing on his post-war ideas instead of the battles he faced, as well as accepting as fact that he would return unscathed.
When we said our final farewells the night before he was to leave, he wouldn’t let me get teary. He lifted my chin up and said, “I’ll write you every week, every day, and I’ll keep your picture and lock of hair in my pocket. Don’t you worry, Daisy. I’ll stay true to my word.”
But no letter came a week later, or two weeks after that, or even a month beyond his departure.
I ran to the mailbox every day to see what was in it. I received letters from Rupert and Andrew, but nothing from Jay. I wrote him. At least at the beginning.
Lilith heard from her fiancé, and Candace from hers, and then came the devastating news that Helen Beaufort’s Theodore died in combat. Shortly after that, word arrived that Dewitt had been grievously injured and might never see again.
The world turned black. I walked to the mailbox timidly, slowly, expecting to receive a letter with bad news from one of Jay’s friends. Either that, or I had to face the fact that he had lied to me and didn’t love me at all, that his battle duty was an escape from entanglement with me. Both scenarios covered my days with grim dreariness.
You would think from Nick’s recounting of our story that we didn’t face heartache except of our own making, that we didn’t face dramatic losses and awful events that took lives and futures. In his account, he ignored the war years, maybe intentionally, because he, like some men, didn’t like to talk about them. Once U.S. involvement produced an armistice, so many wanted just to forget and move on, embracing a wild hedonism to scour out the wounds.
But the war colored everything that happened afterward, in personal lives or general history. The war and the sickness that overlapped its ending had us all reeling. It seemed so pointless, all that suffering. What was gained? If I’d been cynical before about the patriotic fervor that sent men into the mauling war machine, I was even more jaded after. Nothing seemed to matter.
Every day crawled by. Yet every sunrise I wished the days would last longer so that I might receive news—some news, any news.
I worried the army wouldn’t know to contact me about Jay, or where. We weren’t formally engaged though he’d talked of marriage and it had been understood we’d be together when he returned. He’d given me a small ring, something simple that had belonged to his grandmother, he said, a thin gold band with a tiny pearl. It was too big, so I wore it on a chain around my neck.
I stopped going to dances. I made myself sick with worry. I wrote letters to the army to ask about him, but then tore them up before mailing, disgusted with my pathetic pleading.
Staying away from social events seemed the patriotic thing to do now, so I could hide my sadness behind a mask of responsibility.
My father became distracted by all of it, and retreated to his study early every evening, sometimes even eating dinner alone there, his mood glum.
This went on for months as 1917 dragged into the new year until Mother stood in my bedroom door and ordered me to stop moping.
“You can’t do a thing about him,” she announced, “and Jeanine March is hosting a party this weekend for her daughter, who’s marrying next month. We’ll all go. You know her—Claire.”
So we went. It was such an unusually cold night that I simply couldn’t get warm even though I wore a dark blue long-sleeved serge dress and draped a Russian shawl over my shoulders.
The Marches owned a huge house—much larger than ours—on the outskirts of town. Mrs. March had rearranged their very large parlor for dancing, with furniture pushed up against the walls, and a table set up with refreshments. Claire had forgone a coming-out party due to the war, I’d heard, so her mother must have been making up for it with this big and lavish event. There had to have been close to two hundred people there.
I stood in the corner, alone, when Tom came in. Confident, smiling, a girl on his arm, he barely looked at me. Then Mrs. March brought him over after the girl wandered off to talk to some friends.
“This is my cousin’s boy from Chicago, Thomas Buchanan,” she said. “He’s here for the wedding.”
When she left us alone, he poured me some punch and proceeded to spike his with some liquor, which he also offered to me. I accepted. I accepted another after that, and soon we were laughing; I hadn’t laughed in months! We escaped the chill of that vast parlor, and he drove me in a smart cruiser down to the river, where he became very fresh, and I became very loose.
I missed Jay. I thought he was never coming back. I thought he was gone, like Helen’s fiancé, like so many others. I was tired of being despondent. I let Tom take me, on our very first meeting, even though my heart wasn’t in it.
Tom not only stayed for the wedding. He lingered in Louisville for weeks after that. He often came around to see me, and I was smart enough to know that it was my willingness to make love to him that probably drove his attraction.
We drank and had sex. That was our relationship. I was happy to lose myself in liquor then, though I stopped short of inebriation. That would come later. Drinking soothed the hurt of losing Jay.
When I asked Tom his plans for returning to Chicago, he said he would go back to see his family and then return to Louisville.
“Oh, what for?” I asked him. “What will bring you back here?”
“To get married,” he said. “I’ll return to marry.”
“Marry?” I asked, surprised he was so bold about double-timing me and his fiancée, whoever she was. “Who will you marry? Do I know her?”
“Why, it’s you, you silly little fool.” He tapped my nose. “I’ll marry you.”
I scoffed, even attempted to walk away, but he held on to my hand and said, “Would that be so awful, Daisy? Marrying me? I’m not a bad man, you know.”
He was true to his word. He courted me with a ferocity both charming and fearsome. He cheerfully showed up with flowers, chocolates, silk scarves, and jewelry. When he did return to Chicago, he wrote letter after letter, and in my mind they took the place of the ones I didn’t get from Jay. The day after I read of a particularly ghastly battle in France, I took off the necklace with his ring and put it away permanently. I felt a fool for thinking he could possibly have survived.
I was convinced he was dead. Maybe at that point, I even wanted that to be the case. I just wanted to know, to be sure, so I could move on.
My mother and father liked Tom; he came from a respectable, well-established family.
“You could do much worse, and you can’t wait forever,” my mother told me one night. “Tom has spoken to your father.”
I did love Tom. Not in the same open-hearted way I’d loved Jay, but more than I’d felt for Rupert or Andrew, and by then I’d heard that Rupert, too, was dead. He, of the poor eyesight and cartography skills, had been in a headquarters building in France when a German mortar hit it.
I cried over his death. I wept out all my grief for Jay. The very next day, Tom asked for my hand, and I enthusiastically said yes. Jay would want me to go on with life, I reasoned, and I temporarily put him out of my head.
When Tom proposed, it was at the club after a polo match he had played there, and he gave me a stunning diamond ring circled with emeralds and more diamonds. He’d intended on giving it to me at a romantic dinner later, he said, but his victory on the polo field had him feeling exuberant and ready to conquer the world, starting with me.
I no longer felt fresh and young. I felt a bit used up, and once, even Tom hinted we better be careful about our lovemaking, or people would gossip and my reputation would be ruined.
I had told Jay I wanted to be a princess. I couldn’t very well do that without a prince, and Tom was as close to an American one as I would get. His family dated back to the Mayflower, had money by the bushel full, and a name that opened doors from Chicago to New York.
We made plans to marry quickly in the fall. Mother consulted Mrs. Dale, who selected a fine white silk dress with beaded embroidery on its dropped bodice and a filmy floor-length veil held in place by a white rose garland to adorn my head.
Our parlor would be the setting, and Jordan, with whom I’d become good friends the summer before, would be my maid of honor. Flowers were ordered, the menu planned, dinners held to introduce our families to each other. It all happened in a rush—from proposal to vows, a scant six weeks. In those days, fast weddings were as common as long engagements. No one begrudged a couple their happiness.
By this time sickness had crept into our lives. Helen Beaufort came down with the flu and died within a week. Lilith caught it and was bedridden for a month. Barely surviving, she became frail and oddly distant after. Candace too was afflicted, and though she survived, she seemed slower and gentler, no longer capable of the mental lists she had kept before.
Death, it seemed, was everywhere, and if I wasn’t reading obituaries of classmates killed in the war, I was hearing stories of civilian friends who had taken to their sick beds.
It didn’t matter that the war was ending. Its scythe had cut down everything good in life.
Getting ready for the dinner the night before my nuptials, however, when I’d at last reasoned Jay was gone from my life, maybe from all life, a shock came, delivered by the postman a little before three. I’d awakened from a nap and gone downstairs to get a glass of lemonade before asking the maid to draw my bath.
It was unseasonably warm, even though it was fall, and the light coming through our front door’s pebbled glass had an eerie golden-brown hue, as if the sun itself had become an autumn leaf, changing color for the season.
I remember hearing the clock strike the hour as I passed the little table in the foyer, and there, on top of the day’s mail, was an envelope of the thinnest paper, with a military return address.
My heart raced. Though I’d long expected bad news about Jay, I faced its reality now. Sure to find a note from a friend telling me of Jay’s death, I grabbed the envelope and rushed up the steps again, tears already burning my eyelids as I anticipated grief.
You knew this would happen, I told myself. At least you’ll now be sure. You won’t wonder any longer. At least that pain will be gone.
Mother was resting, and Father was running an errand. The help was elsewhere in our big house. I was alone.
I opened my bedroom door, went to the window seat overlooking the back garden, took a deep breath, and slit the envelope with my fingernail.
Tears came, flowing down my cheeks and spotting my mauve linen dress, as I read:
Dear Daisy,
Darling, can you believe it? I’ve been writing to you for months now and only just found out you weren’t getting a single letter! When you stopped writing, I was sure something awful had happened, but then a nice lady across town from you wrote me back that no Daisy Faye lived at the address I was sending my letters to! She said she’d tried notifying the military, but word never came to me until recently.
I’m pretty sure I have the right address now and you’ll write back. I have thought of you every day. It didn’t take long to get “over here” after what seemed a year of training and waiting. Now everything is in a hurry and rumors abound that we’re going home or facing battle again.
After I left you, I couldn’t forget your forlorn face, and nothing on earth would make me happier than to see you again and hold you in my arms, sitting quiet and soft and sweet on the swing of your front porch.
I will be thinking of that time and you, in the days to come. If, God willing, I do come home alive and whole, I know you will still be there, waiting with open arms.
Can you imagine it, dear? Me in uniform with my kit bag walking up the steps to your door? Can you see yourself standing there and jumping up and down a little, the way you would when you got excited about something?
I can.
That’s what holds my spirits up, and it’s what, I’m sure, will keep me alive, knowing you’ll be waiting when I return, just like you promised. Many fellows here don’t have a girl back home, and I feel awfully sorry for them. They don’t fight the same way as those of us with a girl to get back to. All of you ladies keep us going, and I think of you and kiss your picture every night—the same with that sweet lock of hair that still smells like your perfume—every time it looks like we’re headed into battle….
I don’t know how long I sat there, rereading his letter, thinking of what was to come—my wedding to Tom.
Jay was alive. He could still be in harm’s way. And my fidelity was all it took to keep him alive.
I’d failed him.
At some point, as shadows became longer, as the clock chimed another hour, I bestirred myself. I ran downstairs and found a bottle of bourbon.
I simply couldn’t marry Tom. I couldn’t do it.
With shaking hands, I poured myself a tumbler. And then another. And another.
I cried some more. The maid came in, looked at me curiously, and said she’d draw my bath. I told her not to bother.
She scurried out of the room, and I heard her calling my mother.
At some point, Jordan arrived, and she looked at the nearly empty bottle of liquor and shook her head.
“Oh, Daisy,” she said, and wrapped her arms around me. “Let’s get you into a warm bath, shall we?”
Mother was in the room now too—how did she get there? Muddled by booze and grief, I couldn’t keep track of time.
She and Jordan practically carried me upstairs, one on either side of me, Mother saying something about nervous brides and obligations, and Jordan whispering that it would be all right.
I let them shepherd me. I had no idea what was happening. Jordan said she would telephone to the hotel where Tom’s family was staying to let them know we’d be late for the family dinner they’d planned that evening in the hotel restaurant. She went downstairs to place the call.
As I undressed, the doorbell rang. Soon, Jordan appeared in my bedroom, holding a blue velvet box decorated with a gold ribbon. I stood by my bed, naked, paralyzed, Jay’s letter crumpled on the floor.
“It’s from Tom,” she said, and when I didn’t move, she pulled at the bow and opened the box. A stunning pearl necklace lay on a satin cloth. Again, when I didn’t move, she pulled out a note, and read a sweet message from Tom to go with this gift for his bride.
“I can’t do it,” I sobbed, now sitting on the bed, my head in my hands. “J-J-Jay’s alive. Oh, God, he’s still alive!”
Just as my mother came in the room, Jordan saw the letter on the floor and picked it up. She read it silently as my mother fussed.
“Daisy, you’ll catch your death of cold! Here, let’s get your robe.” She brought over a pink silk kimono and pressed it around my shoulders. “Your bath is ready.”
She walked me to the bathroom, Jordan following.
“I’ll stay with her, Mrs. Faye,” she said softly, and closed the door. Like an automaton, I moved forward and slid into the sudsy bath, wanting to sink below its surface and not have to think at all.
“I can’t do it,” I repeated, not to her, but to the room, to the universe. “If I marry Tom, Jay will die!”
“Oh, Daisy, what nonsense,” Jordan said, pulling up a cushioned chair, and placing her hand on my arm. “Look at me.”
Turning my head slowly, I peered into her eyes. “You read the letter. He thinks of me. I keep him alive. What will happen when he learns I…” I couldn’t finish it.
“Nothing will happen. You don’t even know what’s happening now. Listen to me, Daisy. You will marry Tom. You will be happy. Jay will be happy, too. He will live or not and it won’t have a single thing to do with you. Not a thing.”
“But—”
“You can’t ruin your life because of one letter. Stay true to your promise to Tom. I know you love him. You told me so.”
I had told Jordan that, but I think I did so to convince myself it was true. When I thought Jay was gone for good, I’d consciously moved my affection to Tom.
“Think of that—how you have come to love Tom. Don’t toss that aside for one letter. For all you know…”
“Don’t say it!” I shouted. “I won’t think Jay’s dead again. I won’t!”
Undaunted, she went on: “Tom adores you.”
From the hall, my mother’s voice called, “Is everything all right? We need to be going soon.”
At that, Jordan picked up a washcloth and started bathing me, as if I were a child, her gentle hands caressing my body as I closed my eyes and tried to gather rational thoughts. None would come.
Eventually, she helped me stand and dried me off, then brushed my hair. Jordan could be very tender underneath her gruff exterior, and she treated me as if I were a fragile invalid, offering cooing encouragement.
She led me back to my room, while my mother, her brow furrowed, stood silently outside in the hall. Then she helped me dress. When she put Tom’s pearls around my neck, though, I couldn’t bear it, and yanked them free. They scattered to the floor.
Jordan didn’t judge. She didn’t even cluck her tongue. “He can buy you another one.” She stepped back and gazed at me. “There, you look beautiful. We’ll tell Tom you’ve been suffering from a headache, but, Daisy, you will get through this. It’s one night and one day, and then…then you can decide what to do. For now, marry Tom. Don’t ruin your life.”
Somehow I did get through it—the dinner that night, the wedding the next day. Jordan’s words—don’t ruin your life—echoed in my heart and mind every moment. When I was about to falter, she would appear by my elbow and whisper encouragement or ask how I was feeling. For all Tom’s family knew, I was suffering from a splitting headache.
I had never felt such a burden before. It was as if, with every step I took up the aisle to wed Tom, I would be firing the shots that would surely kill that loyal soldier, Jay.
My fidelity was the only cost of keeping him alive—my true love, which I so recklessly promised him and then threw to Tom when I was afraid no one decent would be left to take it.
It was the one hard thing I had been asked to do in my easy life so far, the one thing that required courage—wait for Jay. Yet I’d failed in that task. Failed miserably.
Other women waited patiently for their loves to return from war. Why hadn’t I been able to do so, too?
This revelation made me sick with self-loathing, and part of me wondered if my punishment was this marriage. I had allowed Tom to buy me, with a promise of safety, security, and peace. The pearls were just a symbol of that price.
Mother and Jordan worked hard to help me recover and be presentable that evening and the next day. At some point, I knew Mother had seen the letter. I think she assumed it stayed in the trash bin, but I’d retrieved it after the dinner party was over, flattened it out, wept some more, kissed my fingers to it, then folded it neatly and shoved it into a far corner of my luggage.
I knew I had to marry Tom. And I felt I was dooming Jay by doing so. I consoled myself by thinking I’d not answer Jay’s letter, not tell him of my marriage, and if he should write again—which he did—Mother could send him the news of the wedding. She would know what to say.
So, I married, had the largest and most glamorous reception afterward, then went on a honeymoon, where I forced the past into a box I refused to open. I forced myself to fall in love with Tom.
When we returned to Louisville all tanned and happy for a post-honeymoon visit, my mother took me aside and said she had “taken care of the matter, and that man would not bother me again.”